Cash McCall (1960)

(On Cable TV, October 2022) It’s easy to look at 1960 romantic comedy Cash McCall with a jaundiced eye. After all, several things don’t quite work here, or look considerably worse sixty years later. Having a protagonist being an unrepentant capitalist, a corporate raider and a serial womanizer might not be in-tune with these more sensitive times (although everything about the character of Cash McCall seems designed to make him a role model for a certain kind of young man), and even if you can buy into the character thanks to James Garner’s considerable charm, the film itself seems stuck in an awkward moment of transition between 1950s Technicolor musicals and more self-aware 1960s sardonic comedies. There is some satirical humour through McCall’s lines, but the film itself constantly seems to be missing better opportunities. It works, but only adequately: Garner is fine but not exceptional, Natalie Wood is cute without being as beautiful as elsewhere, the script is amusing without being funny and the story follows the expected beats without really going beyond the strict minimum. I did enjoy the minutiae of made-believe business—McCall calling himself amoral but acting like a progressive’s idea of a good-guy millionaire, the complex machinations that really support nothing but nice sentiments, and the throwback to a business culture that took hold in post-WW2 America: all fun, but we’re clearly still in Hollywood fantasy rather than the truly amoral cut-throat world of business. I won’t accept for a moment that 1960 was any less jaundiced about the world of business: there’s a long list of 1950s films dealing with capitalism with wit and ferocity. In comparison to them, Cash McCall feels lacking: a trifle that had the potential to be more than that.